24% of US households now have a smart speaker

Close to a quarter of US households now own a smart speaker, according to research from Nielsen. On average, those who own these devices spend an average of 65 minutes using them on each weekday, rising to 72 minutes on Saturday and Sunday. In Q1 2018, only 22 percent of US households owned a smart speaker – such as the Amazon Echo, the Apple Homepod, or the Google Home – so this two percent rise (to 24 percent) over the last quarter shows that the technology is gathering some steam. Originally, uptake for smart speakers was slow, with only 800,000 US households having…